Financial Services is using AI more than other industries but seeing a fraction of the benefits
Like most industries, financial services is bullish on the potential of AI. It's in a unique position, however, in that teams have adopted AI far more than the average but seen far fewer benefits.
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In a new survey from product development firm Studio Graphene, 500 managers and executives in UK businesses were asked about the usage of AI within their teams. 78% of respondents said they used AI in some capacity but, for financial services professionals, the usage rate was 91%.
Despite this, fewer financial services professionals were able to clearly define what 'successful' AI implementation was. While 31% of all respondents using AI said they'd seen a return on investment from their AI usage, just 13% of managers in finance were able to justify the cost.
There are many reasons for this. For one, finance and banking in particular are highly regulated industries full of publicly traded companies. They need to be able to justify their actions to investors and some AI tools are either hard to explain or prone to hallucinations.
There's also the fact that the tools today simply aren't good enough for industries prone to perfectionism. Claude for Excel, for example has received various complaints from people in finance; the tried and tested method of having your analysts work 100-hour weeks yields more consistent results. Mo Achour, a Goldman Sachs executive director who left to build an AI startup, told us last week that "there’s no such thing as good enough" in financial services. Goldman CIO Marco Argenti, another AI advocate, told Bloomberg in 2024 that even "0.1% inaccuracy is totally unacceptable."
Despite all this, it's no surprise that financial services firms are trying to make AI work for them. A report from Anthropic earlier this month said that business and finance was one of (if not the) most exposed sector to AI in theory. The bank that is able to realize that potential while 87% see it as a money suck will be very happy indeed.
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